shite talk

I've been wondering about the state of things recently. In particular I'm back on to the subject of free magazines available here in Dublin City. I'm only thinking about this again because I've decided to go to Sweet Talk in the Sugar Club this coming Thursday. As far as I know it has something to do with the creative types that publish online journal Candy Culture. I've been banging on about this subject before in this post here. On reflection I might have been a bit spiteful so please check out the 'caveats' in the comments section of it.

It once again brought back memories of The Slate, a free publication that vilified certain individuals (and rightly so!) but also knew how to have a good laugh at things and itself. In it's own words and on the release of it's 'Best of' edition it states
"For nearly three years, The Slate was the shining light of the Dublin media scene, attracting awe and attention from all quarters. With our cheap controversy, lame jokes and mistakes on every page, we quickly earned the respect of the nation.
Now you can leaf through this selection of our standout moments and learn that:

a) We had no idea what we were doing for the first few issues
b) We regularly changed our mind about things for no reason
c) The Slate was a dab hand at predicting things that never happened"

One inspired moment was the cut-out of Gavin Lambe-Murphy that you could place in your toilet bowl. A personally more inspiring article was one that featured me in my previous guise of The Golden Maverick. It was an article on the quality of radio programming and for some strange reason it transpired that I wasn't too awful to listen to compared to a lot of the shite on air at the time. Being mentioned in the same breath as Donal Dineen, I felt it validated my half-baked radio persona. At that time in my life I didn't know that I wanted or needed validation until I actually received it. Although I'd been happily doing my thing on radio for a number of years before the article 'Saving the Airwaves' appeared in The Slate, I must admit to having a spring in my step after reading it. I wonder what those lads are doing now? They're probably editing The Sunday Business Post or The Farmers Journal.

In the context of my previous posts on the state of Dublin press I wonder if it's the right thing to be denigrating the efforts of others. Besides editing the college paper for a year and making one or two (ok, maybe six or seven!) forays into music journalism I've offerd little to the medium. Judging by the amount of times I've been asked to produce a follow-up I obviously do not have a natural bent for it. No one ever came out straight and said I was shit, but by the same token no one ever said the writing was great. Sometimes, silence speaks volumes. I'm going to keep quiet about other peoples journalistic efforts in future. It seems that God loves a trier but that I'm not quite as forgiving.

I can agree with The Slate on two things

a) I have no idea what I'm writing most of the time
b) I regularly change my mind about things for no reason


PS - When writing all this shite I was doing a bit of interweb research and found the following in relation to someone else having a go at 'Mongrel' magazine. In defence of Mongrel one of their contributors had the following to say: "Incidentally, I'm not middle class and for three glorious years I was one of the main writers on the Slate. So, in conclusion, go fuck yourself." That's a fucking great riposte. Unfortunately it appears that they've stopped writing their blog for a while but I for one will be looking forward to its return, and in the meantime having a root through its archive.